UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS; 265 PAGES; $29.95

If Jesse Unruh hadn't existed, some novelist would have made him up. Even his name is fraught with symbolism: His first name is that of an infamous Western outlaw, while in German "die Unruh" is the balance wheel of a clock - the thing that steadies its tick. Unruh's enemies saw him as the outlaw; his allies relied on him to keep the California legislature running like clockwork.

Unruh's is not only the familiar rags-to-riches tale, but it's also that more fascinating thing, an impotence-to-power tale. From an impoverished childhood on the fringes of the Dust Bowl in Texas, where the Unruhs were "the lowest of the low in the community," he rose to become, as Bill Boyarsky writes in his new biography, "at the height of his power, the single most influential politician in California, first as an assemblyman, then as state assembly speaker, and finally as state treasurer."

A pop quiz: Name the current speaker of the California state assembly and the state treasurer. Only political junkies are likely to come up with the answers instantly. (For the rest of us, they're Fabian Núñez and Bill Lockyer.) Most of us think of political power in terms of presidents, U.S. senators and governors. And one reason why Unruh's name may not reverberate today, 20 years after his death, is that he held none of those titles.

But Boyarsky makes the case that, for a quarter of a century, Unruh played a central role in shaping the California that emerged as the nation's setter of trends, both culturally and politically. Putting it simply, Unruh got his hands on the money, and while some of it may have lined his pockets, he also used it to promote a progressive agenda that transformed California, not only through direct accomplishments in such areas as civil rights and improvements in the state's education system and infrastructure, but also through provoking the conservative backlash represented by such figures as Ronald Reagan and Howard Jarvis.

Boyarsky spent three decades as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and his book is filled with the kind of insights that only a seasoned observer of the ways of Sacramento could provide. He is also an unabashed admirer of Unruh, though he stays well this side of idolatry. And he is a shrewd analyst of the role his own profession plays in the political arena. "Unruh," he writes, "would have been destroyed in the twenty-first-century world of mass communications, with its 24-hour news channels, instant Internet communications, obsession with celebrity, and contempt for privacy."

The assembly to which Unruh was first elected in 1954 was a low-paying, part-time body. Unruh, who had a wife and four children to support, made $300 a month and a small per diem when the legislature was in session. Legislators were dependent on the largess provided by what Unruh called "the Third House, the lobbyists, who were always around willing to pick up a tab." That the tab often included not only food and drink, but also the company of women who were not the legislators' wives that went unreported.

"Editors and reporters did not see a link between public and private conduct," Boyarsky writes. "Everybody bought into the culture. Permitted their privacy, the lawmakers ran wild." And "Big Daddy" Unruh - the nickname came from the larger-than-life character in Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," though some have alleged more salacious origins - was the biggest daddy of them all, famously credited with the aphorism, "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them you've got no business being up here."

Boyarsky records what he calls "Unruh's duality, the brilliant, far-seeing political leader, on the one hand, and the undisciplined chief of a hard-drinking, card-playing, woman-chasing bunch of assemblymen, on the other." He famously locked the assembly in the Capitol one night in 1963 to bring about the passage of a school-finance bill. "As it turned out," Boyarsky writes, "the lockup made the Big Daddy title a pejorative, rather than a label of respect and affection, mixed with fear." Another time, in what Boyarsky calls "a chilling revelation of the underside of journalism and politics," Unruh successfully put pressure on the Ridder family to mitigate an unflattering portrait of him in a series by a San Jose Mercury News reporter.

But Boyarsky also lauds Unruh's many achievements, calling him "one of the creators of twentieth-century California," whose blend of populism, idealism and pragmatism is reflected in "just about every mile of water project, every freeway, every new university campus, every civil rights bill, every piece of legislation protecting consumers, women, and children" - all of which "was won by ferocious combat, deal by deal. [...] He accumulated power so he could make those deals and win those fights."

Boyarsky recognizes what compelling material he has to work with: "His story is more like a novel than a humdrum political biography." Unfortunately, he lacks the novelistic skills to tell the story with true dramatic flair, suspense and color. His political biography isn't humdrum - it's hard to imagine how a book about Unruh could be - but it also isn't the compelling read it might have been. There's not quite enough about Unruh's early years in the Assembly; we are told that he accumulated power but we don't see him doing it. Such rival power players as Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown could have been given more prominent roles in the narrative. And though Boyarsky now recognizes the "link between public and private conduct," he gives us only a sketchy look at Unruh's private side, especially where it concerns his family.

Still, this is a more than welcome picture of a time when politics mattered, when change could be not only wished for but also accomplished, and when personal image and private behavior were judged less important than actual achievement. As Boyarsky puts it, Unruh "wasn't just another drunk at the bar. What raised him above the barroom were his ideas and his vision of what California could be."